


hotel

by eddieo-spaghettio (ElsieMcClay)



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Eddie Kaspbrak & Richie Tozier Bickering, Eddie Kaspbrak is So Done, Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier-centric, Everybody Hates Bill But Sort Of Jokingly, Gen, Horror AU, Humor, Hurt Eddie Kaspbrak, Hurt Richie Tozier, M/M, Reddie Big Bang, hotel monte vista, its kind of like canon but Not, its very interesting look it up, no clown but still supernatural horror, they deal with it with humor, think AHS Hotel minus lady gaga, tw: some violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-17
Updated: 2020-07-17
Packaged: 2021-03-05 00:47:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,034
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25341955
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ElsieMcClay/pseuds/eddieo-spaghettio
Summary: if eddie survived this, he was going to kill bill denbrough.---“Hotel M-Monte Vista in Flagstaff.”“Flagstaff?”“Arizona.”“Why do you want me to go there? Last I heard, hotels in Arizona aren’t exactly the scariest places on Earth.” Richie would know; he’d been to more than one hotel in Arizona in his lifetime and beyond being unbearably hot sometimes, they were nothing to be scared of.“Thuh-This one’s haunted.” Richie could practically hear the mischievous twinkle in Bill’s eyes, like he was still thirteen and plotting against their fifth period teacher.“Of course it is,” Richie grunted. “Yeah, hey, can’t wait to get my ass possessed while I’m taking some stupid pictures of a hotel.”
Relationships: Bill Denbrough & Eddie Kaspbrak, Bill Denbrough & Richie Tozier, Eddie Kaspbrak & The Losers Club, Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier, The Losers Club & Richie Tozier
Comments: 6
Kudos: 35
Collections: Richie/Eddie Bigbang 2019





	hotel

**Author's Note:**

> woo!!! it's been like a year since this big bang started (thanks corona) but it's been a fun time!! we were going to post in april/may but then the world went up in flames and here i am in the middle of july having finally edited this to post and im actually pretty happy with how it all came along! let me know what you think, comments and kudos are always welcome and treasured!
> 
> for more context, look up "hotel monte vista flagstaff, AR" to see pictures of the hotel, the rooms, or to look into some of the reported ghost sightings!! i didn't manage to fit every single ghost in this piece, but there are some really cool stories (and some creepy ones) on the hotel's website, including a ghost bellboy and a crying baby in the basement. it's all very cool. 
> 
> my tumblr: eddieo-spaghettio  
> check out the edit by @ kissbrak!!

_hotel_

“Bill Denbrough! Bill Denbrough!” 

“Bill!”

“Look over here, Bill!” A camera flashed. Bill revealed that infuriating half-smile he always seemed to wear around paparazzi. His hair flipped over his forehead in the same way it had when they were kids, half of it falling over his face like he was some sort of teenage heartthrob actor. He flipped it away and winked at one of the many, many cameras, which would no doubt get a whole bunch of teenagers going on the online forums in a matter of minutes. 

Richie had never known an author to have a _fandom_ , but Bill did, somehow. Neither he nor the other Losers could figure out what made people go crazy for Bill—they called it the Denbrough Effect. 

“Bill! Is it true you’ve got another book in the works? Is it true?” 

Bill laughed and paused. 

“I guh-guess it’s true,” he said, and the noise billowed up around him again, a flurry of voices and questions that he waved off with a single hand. “I s-s-still have to do some research b-before anything is announced.” The noise died, and Bill stepped off the curb and half jogged across the street. In the background, Richie spotted Bill’s bike chained to a rack, gleaming in the L.A. sun. 

A few of the more desperate cameramen followed, but when he gave nothing more and pressed his phone to his ear, they fell away. 

“Hey, Richie,” Bill said into the receiver. He had the gall to sound not at all guilty, and Richie sighed. 

“You need me to go somewhere, don’t you?” 

“Y-Yuh-You saw that?” 

“I watched it on MTV or some shit. Great way to find out you need some more _research_ done—as if you do anything to research. I do it all _for you_ , you dick.” Richie twirled the coiled cord of his telephone and stared harshly up at his ceiling. He muted the TV as the host started on about some other big name guy who Richie didn’t give a shit about. 

“First of all, MTV is for m-muh-music. I’m not a musician, I’m a n-novelist—” 

“You’re so pretentious, Big Bill, holy shit. Just say you’re an author.” 

“—and s-second of all, I was gonna c-call y-y-you, okay? I _am_ calling you, buh-but they got to me first is ah-all.” Richie could practically see Bill shrugging like this was nothing, like he was asking Richie to run off to the store to buy him some bread as a little favor. None of the favors Richie had ever done for Bill were small; he almost wished Bill would ask him, just once, to go buy him some bread or eggs or milk. 

“You still owe me from last time. You know, for a best-selling author, you’re stingy as hell.” 

“You remember luh-luh-last time?” Bill asked, Richie debated hanging up on him then and there. He pressed his lips into a thin, hard line. 

“Do I—Yes, _William,_ I remember last time. You sent me into that stupid-ass music hall in Ohio, and the floor fell through while I was standing on it. I was in the hospital for a week. A week, Bill!”

“Okay, I guh-get it.” 

“And you didn’t even go through with that book! I almost gave my life for you, and it was for nothing.” 

“I get it, Richie! A-And you didn’t _almost g-give your life_. You b-b-broke your leg, a-and you lived for the at-attention.” Richie huffed and rolled his eyes again. He leaned back on his couch and kicked his feet onto the coffee table. It rattled and tilted precariously under his weight. “This one’s d-duh-different, all right? I can f-feel it. It’s a good one.” 

“Where am I going?” he sighed, and he rolled his eyes because Richie was weak, okay, he was a weak man, and he knew it. 

“Hotel M-Monte Vista in Flagstaff.”

“Flagstaff?” 

“Arizona.” 

“Why do you want me to go there? Last I heard, hotels in Arizona aren’t exactly the scariest places on Earth.” Richie would know; he’d been to more than one hotel in Arizona in his lifetime and beyond being unbearably hot sometimes, they were nothing to be scared of. 

“Thuh-This one’s haunted.” Richie could practically hear the mischievous twinkle in Bill’s eyes, like he was still thirteen and plotting against their fifth period teacher. 

“Of course it is,” Richie grunted. “Yeah, hey, can’t _wait_ to get my ass possessed while I’m taking some stupid pictures of a hotel.” 

“It’s to capture the m-m-mood of the place, Richie,” Bill sighed, and even through the phone, Richie could almost see him pinching the bridge of the nose the way he always did when Richie pissed him off. 

“People have already taken pictures of your haunted-ass hotel,” Richie told him, “that’s what the internet is for. It’s 1993, not the Neolithic Age, you old fart.”

“Anyone can write a b-book about _pictures on the internet_. I wuh-w-want originals.”

“You’re difficult.” 

“And you’re the best,” Bill laughed. Richie mulled it over: Bill would really owe him after this, and Richie could think of a whole hell of a lot to ask him to do already. 

Or he could get him to do something stupid as payback. That thought alone made Richie relent. 

“Fine, but I’m taking Eddie—”

“Of cuh-course you are.”

“—and if I end up in the hospital, I will never speak to you again.” That was a lie, and they both knew it, but he said that every time Bill sent him off to his death. Bill laughed. 

“I-It’s not m-my fault you’re clumsy as hell, Trashmouth. And, hey, say hi to Eh-Eddie for me, would you?”

“Asshole.” Richie hung up, and the phone hummed with the dial tone.

* * * * 

[ _Inbox - 1 Email_ ]

**billdenbrough@outlook.com:** Here are your tickets to FLAGSTAFF, AZ. Enjoy your time w/ Eddie ;)

**rch1etoz@outlook.com:** ur an ass

[ _Email forwarded to edwardkaspbrakk@outlook.com_ ]

**rch1etoz@outlook.com:** u wanna come w/????

**edwardkaspbrakk@outlook.com:** Already Packed! [ _img_9510.JPG_ ]

* * * *

“Richie—” 

“Eds.” 

“We have to go inside at some point,” Eddie continued. “It’s hot out here. And don’t call me that, dumbass.” It wasn’t really that hot, what with the sun setting on the horizon behind the tall hotel building, but the two were used to the cool spring, practically winter air of Maine despite the fact that it was nearly May. Arizona was nose-bleed dry compared to Maine’s dampness, and Richie’s shirt stuck to the insides of his elbows and armpits. 

“We don’t _have_ to go in,” Richie reasoned. The blinking “HOTEL” light mocked him from above. 

“I did not just spend eight hours on a plane with you of all people just for your fear of _ghosts_ to stop us at the doors.” Eddie crossed his arms over his chest, the sleeves of his gray t-shirt stretching around his biceps. He raised a single brow and jerked his head in the direction of the windowed door that opened in the lobby. “You know I don’t believe in ghosts or demons or poltergeists or whatever the hell it is Bill wants us to find here.” 

Eddie turned on his heel, ignoring Richie’s meek protests, and he opened the door. He swept his hand out and bowed, and Richie’s lips quirked—shit. He liked him, had liked him since they were kids, and he liked him so much it hurt and ached in the middle of his sternum. 

“Why thank you,” Richie said in his Southern Gentleman Voice. “Good to know chivalry has a pretty face like yours, honey.” Eddie grinned and stepped into the lobby after him, and if the light wasn’t playing tricks on him, Richie might have thought Eddie blushed, too, with how his cheeks went all rosy.

Richie followed Eddie through the lobby, so oblivious and heart-eyed that he didn’t notice the glass sliding across the bar with no one there to move it, liquid sloshing up around the edges and spilling over onto the bar counter. 

Eddie stood before the elevator, eyeing the old, metal plaque above the sliding doors. Richie tumbled into the mirrored, metal box, the globe light on the ceiling casting a golden-edged shadow over his face. He grinned from inside and held out a hand for Eddie to grab, but he ignored it, face pink, and took up the space next to Richie. He pulled out a pack of baby wipes, the sort that smelled sickeningly clinical like a hospital (or like the Kaspbrak house itself), but Richie pressed the button before Eddie could spend two hours disinfecting it. 

“Richie, those buttons are probably _disgusting_. You don’t know who—” 

“Floor number two, please, Mr. Elevator Man,” Richie said, and Eddie scowled at being interrupted. The elevator jerked and rattled, and his expression fell away. He threw out a hand and fumbled for Richie’s wrist. His short fingers wrapped around Richie’s arm and squeezed, squeezed harder with each jerk of the elevator until the doors slid open again. A hallway extended endlessly in both directions, lined with doors and beige walls, and bland paintings of fruit. 

Eddie squinted down the hall in both directions. 

“Which room?” 

“Two-twenty, I think,” Richie said. He dug around in his backpack, crouched in the middle of the hall, for the book of notes Bill sent to him: a cheap, black notebook with many pages dog-eared and marked in some way or another. Bill’s chaotic scrawl filled the pages in long paragraphs, his words as messy on the page as they were on his lips. 

Bill had made Richie promise he would handle the journal with the _utmost_ care in his letter that had come with the journal itself. 

_Spill anything on it, and I’ll kill you,_ it read. _I’ll kill you, Richard Tozier, if you ruin this journal. I’m not kidding._

Richie thought the death threats were a little bit overkill, but whatever.

“Yeah, two-twenty, and—holy shit!” Richie chortled, eyes scanning the messy scrawl that detailed the room Bill wanted them to stay in. “They call it Meat Man’s room!” Richie’s laughter echoed down the hall, bouncing off the bland walls and closed doors. Eddie groaned. 

“I’m gonna kill him,” Eddie muttered as he started down the hall. He glanced at every one of the metal plaques outside the doors he passed. “He knew what he was doing with that one. _Oh, I’m Bill Denbrough, I’m just gonna torture Eddie,_ ” he continued in a frankly terrible imitation of Bill’s voice. He rolled his eyes. 

Richie jogged to catch up, grinning widely and clutching the journal in the hand not occupied by his suitcase. The door, when Eddie found it, was propped open for them, a note taped over the peephole. 

“DON’T CLOSE. 

SOMEONE WILL BE BY WITH A MASTER KEY BEFORE MIDNIGHT. DOOR WILL LOCK IF CLOSED. DO NOT CLOSE.” 

Eddie took the note down and squeezed through the crack in the door. Richie stepped forward to follow him into the room, but he paused at the sound of a distant laugh—or, a giggle, more like, far-off and young. Childish, even, and really freaking creepy. A chill ran up Richie’s spine at the sound, each hair on his neck standing on end. The hallway was suddenly ice cold, as if someone had cranked the air conditioning up. Sweat cooled on Richie’s skin. 

Richie glanced down the hallway to his left, to his right, his brows drawn in toward the crooked bridge of his nose. He bit his lip and shook his head at himself. 

He stepped through the door and tried hard not to think about it. 

The room was green, the paint chipped around the corners where the ceiling met the walls, and there was a single queen bed inside. The two shared a look over the bed, and Eddie tossed his suitcase down at the foot of it. 

“If nothing else comes of this stupid trip, I want to meet the Meat Man,” Richie said. 

“I knew I’d regret coming here with you. If anything, Bill owes me for coming here with you when he _knew_ there was a ghost-guy-thing named Meat Man.” Eddie fell back on the bed, and the springs squealed loudly in protest. He huffed out a breath, loud in the silence of the room. Richie jumped at the sound of the bedsprings and thanked God that Eddie didn’t notice because he would never hear the end of it if he had. “I’m bored already. Is this all you do on these things? You just sit in whatever shithole room Bill puts you in until you feel like taking pictures and then you go home?” 

Richie mulled it over for a moment. That was pretty much it, yeah, but Eddie didn’t know that, and he didn’t have to know that. 

“I mean, I could think of a few ways to spice up our time here.” Richie winked. He winced. _Shut up, shut up, shut up, shut the hell up._ “I hear Meat Man has quite the little meat man, if you know what I mean.” _Shit, shit, shit._ Eddie scowled and stood. He glared at Richie, and if looks could kill, Richie would be long on his way to becoming just another ghost stuck in this hotel. He winced and opened his mouth to apologize, but Eddie started toward the open door before he could. 

“That’s it,” he muttered, and Richie closed his eyes and ran his hands over his face and through his hair. “I’m leaving to explore.” 

“Be careful!” Richie called after him, but Eddie just flipped him off behind his back, already halfway down the carpeted hallway. 

“Shut the hell up about the ghosts, Richie. I’ll be fine,” he called over his shoulder, and Richie retreated back into the room and fell back on the bed the same way Eddie had not moments before, before Richie had pissed him off. 

For a long, long while, Richie stared at the cracks that ran across the ceiling like thin, dark bolts of lightning and ran over a million ways to apologize in his head as he always did when he pissed people off. It happened just about as often as people expected from _Trashmouth Tozier_ , the kid who never shut the hell up and never had the control to stop himself even after he crossed the invisible line. 

_I’m sorry._

_You know me, I never mean it (unless I do.)_

_It was kind of funny, you gotta give me that, Eds. It was kinda funny._

But then that laugh, the one from the hallway outside the elevator, childish and creepy as all Hell and haunting, ran past the closed door, getting louder and then quieter, and Richie’s head jerked, eyes wide and apologies suddenly forgotten. 

Richie stood, movements slow, the floor and the bed springs both creaking under his weight, moving to the door with cautious steps, like if he moved too fast, whatever it was that lingered on the other side would jump for him and wrap its hands around his throat and press and press until he couldn’t breathe, and—

He tried hard, once again, not to think about it. He had to find Eddie, even if it meant Eddie would make fun of him and his belief of something not-quite-human, something dead and gone but still here, stuck and angry. 

Richie stuck his head back into the hall and looked to his left and to his right and to his left again like they drilled into kids’ heads when they taught them how to cross the street. _Look left, and right, and left again._

Richie wandered down the hallway, every bland wall looking exactly the same as the last, each door the same as the one next to it and the one across from it and the one three hallways down.

“Eddie?” he called, his voice loud in the silent hallway, the carpet muffling his footsteps. “Eds?” No one called back. 

The laughing came from behind him, so close that goosebumps rose across his arms, and the hair on the nape of his neck stood on end again. He turned around but found no one standing there. His eyes searched for the source of the laughter but found nothing. 

“Hello?” 

Richie started back down the way he came. The door at the end, the first one before a corner and another hallway, opened into a dark room, and he was sure it hadn’t been open the first time he had passed it. (203, no it hadn’t been open, he remembered because he looked at it and thought _“_ another closed door, seriously, I’m over reacting. _”_ )

This door creaked when he pushed it open—eerie, like the doors in horror movies did. He thought he might have just walked into his very own horror movie: _Richie Tozier’s Death and Demise, Caught on Tape_. 

The room looked the same as his and Eddie’s room just down the hall: green walls, one bed against the wall to his right, the paint above the headboard peeling away from the wall underneath so he could see the mildew-stained wallpaper and the brick beneath that where the paper, too, peeled away. 

“Hello?” he said again, and no one answered. The laughter sounded to his left, muffled but closer, even, than it had been in the hallway. Richie kneeled before the bed and held his breath as he bent so his cheek rested on the scratchy carpet, the old, damp smell of it making him want to gag. He reached out for the dragging bed skirt, his fingers brushing the dark unknown in the shadows under the bed, and—

“What are you doing?” 

Richie yelped and dropped his hand away from the bed skirt and the darkness and whatever it was that taunted him with its laughter. He rolled over, chest heaving and eyes wide, and Eddie stared down at him, hands on his hips and a single brow raised. He chewed his bottom lip and amusement danced in his eyes. 

“Nothing,” Richie stuttered on the lie, and he craned his neck to spare a glance at the shadows under the bed again. Silence met him. Nothing in the shadows moved or so much as twitched. “Thought I heard something.” He thrust his hand up into the open air between them, and Eddie’s palm met his clammy one as he tugged him up. Richie stumbled on his feet, but Eddie steadied him with a hand on his bicep. 

“How’d you get in here, anyway? All the other rooms are locked,” Eddie said. “I tried them.” 

“I dunno.” The two emerged in the long hallway again. Richie found himself searching for the voice again, and he shoved his hands deep into the pockets of his jeans. “It was just open, I guess. Thought I might as well let myself in.” 

Eddie turned to him and grinned widely, eyes sparkling as if he had just remembered something important. “I found something in this shithole, c’mon!” He took Richie by the sleeve and dragged him toward the elevator again, but he led him past the metal doors to the stairwell. 

Their footsteps echoed in the winding staircase, the walls gray and industrial and the stairs concrete. Richie tripped on his own two feet, and Eddie laughed. He didn’t seem so mad, now, as he tugged Richie along after him, through the carpeted lobby and past the bar and the darkening windows and through the tall archway Richie hadn’t so much as spared a glance toward on his way in. 

A large, empty room with wooden floors met them, round tables pushed to the walls and chairs folded up in the corners, with a bar on the wall farthest from them. 

“What is this, Eds?” Richie turned all the way around, looking at each wall and dilapidated detail. 

“It’s a ballroom, dumbass.” Eddie released his sleeve only to take Richie’s hand in his own, so their fingers linked. The low light fell across Eddie’s cheekbones so prettily, sunset shining through the round-topped windows. He raised Richie’s hand up, placed his other hand on Richie’s hip and spun the two around in the middle of the empty dance floor. 

There was no music, the only sounds in the room being their shoes on the wooden floor and their breaths echoing between their close bodies.

(But if Richie listened hard enough, he could have sworn he could hear music, the sort that only ever played in movies, classical and upbeat, and the sound of a thousand pairs of shoes on the floor. He could have sworn he heard it, but he was too focused on how pretty Eddie looked right then to really listen.) 

Where neither could see—or maybe they just weren’t paying attention to anyone or anything but each other—another couple danced, the two of them long dead, but identical smiles stretched out over their faces. 

The two danced for hours, until the other couple disappeared, and their faces flushed, their chests tightened. They said nothing but smiled so hard at each other that their cheeks hurt, ached something fierce, but they couldn’t stop. 

They danced until the hotel manager or something-or-other stepped into the lobby, the big glass door closing announcing her arrival. She was a small girl, thin and petite, with curly hair and thin-wired glasses. Her cardigan sweater hung off of her shoulders. 

“Hello?” she asked, and they jumped apart with red cheeks and eyes as wide around as the saucers Maggie Tozier kept in the china cabinet—like a couple of teenagers who got caught doing something they shouldn’t have been doing. Eddie trained his eyes on his shoes, and Richie rubbed the back of his neck and chewed his bottom lip. She smiled politely and waved in their direction. “I see you guys found the cocktail lounge!” she said, gesturing to the room. “But here’s the master key. It’ll unlock any room in the place.” 

“Um,” Richie muttered, and his face burned red-hot. “Thanks?” He coughed awkwardly, and Eddie avoided his gaze; if the girl felt the weird tension that filled the room, she said nothing about it. Her smile never faltered on her cheeks. She waved the thin, white keycard in their direction. 

“Sure! It’s no problem, really. Anything for _Bill Denbrough_ , you know? We’re all real excited for him to write about ‘bout us here in Flagstaff. Hey, would you tell him that I really liked his book—what was it? _The Black Rapids_? Yeah, that one. Not so much the ending, but I liked it well enough, even though Mrs. Walters thinks it’s not one of his better novels. Could you leave out the bit about the ending and Mrs. Walters, though?” She gasped for a breath after the rapid onslaught of word-vomit, and Eddie snorted so hard it must have hurt. He covered the sound with a fake cough and a hand under his nose. 

“We all agree his endings suck,” Richie told her as he took the card from between her spindly fingers. She nodded so hard Richie worried she’d have whiplash by the time she left the hotel. “We’ll tell him, don’t worry. And, hey, just between you ‘n me, _Black Rapids_ definitely isn’t his best book.” Richie winked and grinned, and the girl laughed, the sound high and tittering. 

“Thank you,” she said, and with that, she turned on her heel and left. Richie watched her go through the wide, tall windows. She half-skipped, half-walked down the sidewalk until she came to a little, red car. She opened the passengers’ side door, sat down, and the car drove off into the mass of lights down the street. 

Silence engulfed the room, and Richie switched the card around between his fingers like he learned to do with playing cards when he was younger. 

His gaze darted toward Eddie, where he stood, still, in the middle of the room. He pressed the toe of his shoe into the ground and avoided Richie’s eyes. He crossed his arms over his chest and kept his head down. Richie cleared his throat. 

“I should—”

But Eddie spoke at the same time: “I’ll just—” 

The two paused. Richie closed his eyes and sighed. 

“I’m gonna go take some pictures,” he murmured, and he nodded once. “Yeah, I’ll…for Bill.” Richie held up the key and jerked his thumb over his shoulder in the direction of the stairwell and the elevator as he said it. He all but ran for the door labeled “STAIRS” in big, official letters, and he took them two at a time on his way up. 

Night had fallen in all the time Richie spent with Eddie in the cocktail lounge, the stars bright beyond the lights of the city, though not quite as bright as they always were in Derry, dimmed by the lights inside town. 

Richie dug his camera out from his luggage and pressed the key into his palm and tried his hardest not to think about how he had just danced with Eddie. His cheeks burned at just the thought. 

_What are you, a teenager? Man up!_

He closed his eyes tight, rubbed the heels of his palms into the sockets and sighed. He almost wanted to sit down on the edge of the bed and wait for Eddie, but the mortification from getting caught still burnt hot in his gut and in his blood. Richie swallowed it down, ignored it because that was what he did best besides _talk, talk, talk_ before leaving the room. 

He took to the stairs again, the whole way to the third floor, and the lock for room 305 clicked as Richie let himself in. This room was a little bigger than his and Eddie’s downstairs, but the walls were wallpapered instead of painted, a floral print on every wall. If he spun in circles in the middle of the room, he thought the pattern alone might have made him sick. A rocking chair sat towards the single tall window in the room, empty and rickety.

Part of him wanted to sit in it just to say he had, but the other part recalled Bill’s words from the journal: _Room 305, ghost woman. Rocking chair rocks without anyone in it. Mild ghost, no history of violence. Photos during evening or dusk._

Richie rolled his eyes as he raised the camera to take a picture. 

“Picky bastard,” he muttered to the empty room, and the flash on his camera illuminated every crack and crevice of the rocking chair. “Not even a _please._ It’s like no one ever taught him any damn manners.” He glanced down to check the photo, and when he looked back up, the chair creaked and rocked forward. Richie shivered. A deep gust of air blew through the room, through Richie himself, and he stepped around the chair to push the window closed. 

Old buildings’ windows never quite settled right with the rest of the place, that much he knew from all the times he had done shit like this for Bill. 

The chair still rocked even as Richie moved onto the next room. Dusk settled over Flagstaff, shadows growing on the floor of every single room in the hotel. 

Richie crossed the hall to 306 and slid the card over the electronic lock again. The door closed heavily behind him, slamming hard so hard against the frame that the hinges rattled. 

_Room 306; Two prostitutes killed in 1940s, sometimes violent toward men staying in the room._

“Hey, ladies,” he said to no one, and he could almost hear Stan’s voice next to him: _Don’t provoke ghosts, Richie. It’s a bad idea, Richie. Just shut up for once, Richie._ Not for the first time in his life, Richie wished he wasn’t so much of an idiot, wished he knew when to keep his mouth shut. 

He raised his camera, framed the photo how he knew Bill liked them, and the flash popped through the dark room. Another picture, another flash. He moved for the other corner of the room, back pressed almost flush against the wall and feet moving in nothing more than a slow shuffle. The soles of his beat-up shoes scuffed on the carpet. 

He snapped the final picture and opened them on the small, grainy screen in the middle of the camera. Pictures of the room stared back at him, lit only by the flash from his camera, the window dark and the night casting eerie shadows over the ceiling and the corners and over the two pale women on the other side of the bed that surely were not standing there when he looked up again. His blood ran cold in his veins. 

The women in the picture bled from ghostly cuts on their foreheads and cheeks, their thinned-out hairlines matted with dried, flaking blood. Bruises covered their necks and faces, and one’s neck was bent sickly, unnaturally. 

In the next picture, they had moved around the bed and stood at the foot, and in the last—

Richie’s throat closed, a hand closing around his neck and squeezing and squeezing and he couldn’t breathe, couldn’t get air into his lungs, and the heels of his feet left the floor as he slid up the wall, up up up, and _he couldn’t breathe,_ or he would’ve screamed, screamed for Eddie or for help or for Eddie to get the hell out of this place. He kicked out but met only empty air. Black spots danced on the edges of his blurred vision. He kicked again, the movement erratic and panicked, more instinct than conscious thought behind it.

Richie dropped back to the ground, and his knees went out from under him. He collapsed in a heap on the floor, his fingers scrabbling against the carpet, and his other hand came up to his neck which was hot with still-forming bruises. He coughed hard and gagged on his tongue. 

_Eds._

Richie tumbled down the concrete stairs, not quite sure how he had managed to get out of room 306 without keeling over and bashing his own head in. His head felt a little lighter, now, his vision a little clearer, but mostly, he buzzed with delirium and hysteria and the need to get to Eddie. 

He wasn’t thinking about how embarrassing being pressed against him was anymore, but he thought he might press his lips against Eddie’s the moment he found him, just because something not-real and _dead_ had just strangled him in the upstairs room of a haunted hotel in Flagstaff, Arizona, and everything just felt a little crazy right now. _Richie_ felt a little crazy right now, stumbling through the metal door of the stairwell and into another bland, carpeted hallway on the second floor, and he prayed Eddie went back to the room; he prayed, he prayed, he prayed.

He found Eddie sitting against the wall outside room 220, his head resting on his knees and his arms around his shins, and Richie ran a hand along the wall to keep himself upright. He stumbled and tripped over his own two feet. Richie gasped for air; he wondered, crazily, if Eddie still carried his inhaler, if it would help with breathing after getting strangled by two dead women. 

“Eds,” he called, and his voice grated on his throat horribly. Eddie’s head jerked, and he narrowly avoided hitting it off the wall behind him. His expression went from relief to embarrassment to anger to concern in the span of as many seconds as it took for Richie to all but fall over in front of him. 

“Richie,” he answered, more of a statement than a greeting, and his eyes went wide with worry. “Richie, what happened? Are those—are those _bruises_?” His cool fingers brushed over the burning bruises on his neck. Richie winced, and he grabbed Eddie by his wrist and pulled him up from the floor. 

“We’re leaving,” he said shortly, and Eddie protested only by not moving when Richie moved to pull him back down the stairs. Eddie didn’t move from his spot before the door to room 220, though. When Richie turned around, the question died on his lips; the expression that met him on Eddie’s face was one of drawn-out worry, disgust, something familiar from when the two of them were kids and Eddie was scared of almost everything. 

“You—I need you to see this,” he said, eyes wandering from Richie’s face to the door. “Just so I know I’m not crazy. I need you to see it, too.” Eddie’s voice shook like he was scared Richie wouldn’t see whatever it was that had him so shaken. 

Richie opened the door to the room and caught the smell before he saw anything: sickening and coppery like he had just had the worst nosebleed of his life, but he really thought he should have seen it first. 

Chunks of bleeding meat—meat from what, animal or human, Richie didn’t know, he didn’t know, and he didn’t want to know—hung from the light fixture, thick ropes suspending each bit in the air above the bed. The chunks swung to and fro, forward and back in the air. The carpet and the foot of the bed were both stained a deep red, deeper even, than the blood on the women’s faces in his pictures. This blood, to Richie, looked newer. _Fresh._

“Eds—what?” 

“I don’t know, Richie,” he called from the hallway, not daring to even stand in the doorway where he could see. He sounded vaguely sick, like if he so much as thought about the room he might have thrown up, and Richie...Richie felt like he might just blow chunks then and there, too. His stomach rolled, bile hot in the pit of his gut, but nothing came up. “I came in and it was just… _there_ , and I couldn’t take it, so I left, and then you came, and—”

“Yeah, Eds. It’s okay.” Eddie didn’t even correct him on his name. 

Richie stared at the room and the blood and the meat for a few more seconds, and he would have laughed if he knew it wouldn’t hurt; the nickname Meat Man suddenly made a whole hell of a lot more sense to him. 

But Richie was scared shitless, to be frank, and he turned on his heel and let the door slam closed behind him. The wall shook. Down the hall, the thing from earlier laughed again, young-sounding but eerie. 

“We’re leaving,” he repeated, and he took Eddie by the hand. This time, when he started down the hall, Eddie followed. He linked his fingers with Richie’s, sweaty palms pressed against Richie’s as he tugged him along down the stairs.

A man sat at the bar, a gun not a foot from his left hand where it laid across the counter. The other hand nursed a dark amber drink. He had a thick beard and haunted eyes and pale, waxy skin that peeled away from the wiry muscles and yellowed bones underneath in more than one place. One eye was swollen over, black and blue, and his lip was split and leaking black, foul-smelling blood down his chin. His blood was the same consistency as cake batter, dripping down the side of his wrinkled, mildew-stained shirt in thick clumps. The clumps fell through the air and hit the ground with a sick squelching noise. 

Richie eyed the gun, not sure if it was his mind playing tricks on him ( _none of this was real, it couldn’t be, it wasn’t real_ ) or if the gun was real and sitting right there on the bar next to a man who really should not have been in the hotel: dead or alive. 

“Shit,” Eddie hissed through his teeth, and Richie quieted him with a squeeze of his hand around Eddie’s. His fingernails dug into the skin, but Eddie said nothing about it hurting. The man didn’t turn, and he laughed like someone told a joke. The lobby, aside from the man and Eddie and Richie, was silent and empty as far as they could see. Richie’s breath echoed in his ears. 

“C’mon,” he whispered, and he and Eddie snuck past the man. He threw back his head and sucked the rest of his drink down. 

“Another!” he called and slapped his hand down on the counter. The sound echoed painfully around the lobby, like the sound of a belly flop at the Derry Local Pool. The man’s pockets jingled with coins, and he rumbled with laughter. Eddie gasped and cut himself off by biting his own lip hard enough that Richie feared it would split under his teeth. The man’s drink filled before their eyes with no bartender to do it. 

“Go,” Richie urged. His throat ached something fierce, the finger-shaped bruises around his neck pulsing in time with his own heart, and he pushed Eddie in front of him. He glanced over his shoulder at the bleeding man as he drank and drank and drank more than any living man should have been able to. 

Eddie tried the door. He pulled and grunted, but it didn’t budge, like someone or some unseen _something_ held it closed, trapping the two inside with all these things, some they could see and some they couldn’t, like the hands and the women in room 306. For the first time since it happened, Richie thought of how he had dropped his camera in that room and never picked it back up, and he didn’t understand, but he understood well enough, he guessed. 

He understood well enough. 

His throat throbbed terribly, and if it wouldn’t hurt like a bitch, he thought he would finally blow chunks all over the carpet of the lobby right there. 

Richie calmed his stomach as much as he could manage and closed his eyes. Eddie’s nearby breathing filled the silence of the room as the man behind them choked and gagged on the burning taste of his drink and called _another!_ again, like he was in some never-ending loop of laughing, bleeding, drink, _another!,_ and all of it again. 

“The basement,” Richie whispered, his voice cracking and giving away like a thin string snipped in half. He opened his eyes, finally, and Eddie gaped at him. Richie yearned to grab his hand again, feel his shaking fingers grip his own, so he did. Eddie did not pull away or protest. In fact, he held Richie’s hand tight in his own. 

“Are you joking?” Eddie spat, and his brows drew in toward the skinny bridge of his nose. “This is a shitty time for jokes, Rich—we’re not going to the _basement_ in a _haunted hotel._ ” 

“Bill’s journal—I remember it said something about a tunnel in the basement. If we want to get out of this damn place, we’re going to have to go that way.” Richie didn’t mention all the things Bill’s journal said lingered down there, too, but he figured what he did or didn’t say didn’t matter anymore, and Eddie probably didn’t want to know what Bill’s stupid freaking journal said. Richie wished he didn’t know.

Eddie nodded once and let Richie lead him past the drunk, bleeding man at the bar again. Both of them kept their gazes glued to him and to the door on the farthest wall of the lobby labeled BASEMENT in black lettering on a faux-gold plaque. It reminded Richie of the door to the basement of the Derry Public Library and the archives shrouded in shadows down there, the tall, metal shelves and unlabeled boxes of an endless (frankly boring) history. In all the years he’d lived in Derry, Richie never dared to venture down the stairs; Bev told him, once, that if you went down there and screamed until your throat went raw and started to bleed, it would just echo back to you, and no one upstairs would hear it. 

Richie opened the door, the stairs stretching out into long, dark shadows before him, and with one final look toward the man—he’d listed forward, so his back curved over the edge of the bar, and his hand hung by his hip, and he might as well have been dead right there on the bar with how he wasn’t moving, and from so far away, Richie couldn’t tell if he was even breathing anymore—Richie pushed Eddie through the door and urged him down the wooden stairs. 

“Shit, Bill. A basement?” Eddie muttered, more to himself, Richie thought, than to anyone else. Somewhere in the dark, water dripped from rusted, creaking pipes, and the musty, clinical smell of outdated and long-expired cleaning supplies burnt Richie’s nose. He coughed on it, gagged on it painfully, and he couldn’t breathe again until he sucked in a breath of damp basement air that tasted rotten on his tongue. His eyes watered, blurred the room so each shadow looked too much like a figure watching and lying in wait for them. 

The final stair protested Eddie’s weight with a sharp shriek that cut off as his once-pristine sneaker met the smooth concrete below. Richie followed a step later—another creak, and a drip of water somewhere far off where neither could see in the dark—and something else, something unseen and dark, lingered next to them, too, tall and gangly. Time seemed to freeze, and Richie couldn’t tell if the thing in the dark was real and solid and tangible, or if it was just a shadow, a trick of the light. He prayed for the latter, but of course, Richie had rotten luck. 

This _thing_ struck Eddie, his head snapping toward Richie as his eyes rolled back so only the whites were visible in the suffocating dark of the basement. Eddie fell in a heap against the closest wall, his head bouncing against the grey brick, and Richie yelled wordlessly, a garble of sound on his lips, his voice hoarse and lost. His cry, like the creak of the stair, cut off with a dull groan as the shadowed, unseen man struck him down, too, with a large, almost clawed hand. 

Even in his waning consciousness, Richie’s hand reached for Eddie’s prone form. The figure’s hands wrapped around his arms and dragged him away. His head lolled to the side, his chin bumping on his collar bone. His hand fell away from Eddie.

When Eddie woke, Richie was gone, and he gasped for mouthfuls, lungfuls of damp, rusted air like he had been suffocated underwater for the last however-long. His chest ached and burned. 

“Richie?” he called, half choking on the word alone. His voice came back to him in a distant echo. Eddie swallowed and coughed and struggled to his feet, using one hand on the wall to steady himself. “Richie?” He listed toward the wall and fumbled for support again. His vision shifted in his eyes, twisted and spun like a kaleidoscope of dark shapes and colors. “Rich!” 

No one answered. Eddie’s voice bounced back at him from a wall so far from where he stood, he couldn’t see it in the dark of the large room.

Eddie gasped for a breath around his seizing panic and fumbled for the shelf nearby like it would shield him from whatever the hell it was that knocked him over, whatever it was that lingered down here. Eddie listened to the echoing silence for a long, long time, so long he thought he was going to go crazy, absolutely insane, the sort of crazy that Sonia used to tell him he would go if he watched too much television. 

Her voice came to him in the quiet of the basement. Distant and different than it probably was before he left Derry, distorted by time. The sound grated on him— _Eddie-Bear_ , sung like she was calling to him from down the stairs in that damn prison of a house—and his pounding skull until it grew unbearable, like his ears would start to bleed and he couldn’t tell if the dripping of the pipes onto the concrete had gotten louder or if he really had just gone crazy, and his temples pulsed in time with his racing heart. Goosebumps rose across every inch of his skin and where was Richie and what happened and _we need to get out of here or we’ll die, I know we will!_

_We’ll die!_

For the first time since he left Derry with Richie years and years ago, Eddie’s hand grappled for the inhaler he no longer carried. The last time he carried it, Bill was just starting to drafting his first novel, and Ben made big plans for even bigger buildings, and Bev left for New York, and Mike got a job in the library where he had spent so many afternoons as a kid—how he could stay in Derry for longer than he had to, Eddie would never know—and Stan met Patty in college and called home about her, about how much he liked her, about how he was sure he would marry her one day. (By home, he meant The Losers, because The Losers had always been home). The last time Eddie carried his inhaler, he decided enough was enough, and Richie did too, and they left in the dead of night. Together and alone and without telling anyone other than The Losers. Eddie had chucked the plastic piece of shit into the bushes just next to the “ _Leaving Derry, come back soon!_ ” sign, Richie’s hand gripping the end of his shirt so he wouldn’t fall out of the window as he leaned out, the road speeding by under the wheels of Richie’s old truck. On his way out of Derry, Eddie yelled louder than he’d ever yelled before, wordless and euphoric, and Richie begged from inside the car: “Get back in here before you fall and die!” That day, Eddie felt breathless in a way he never had before, in the best way, in a way Sonia never let him feel. 

He hadn’t needed his inhaler since, but shit, he was going to die without it, now, he was going to suffocate on his own tight lungs and tight throat, and Richie would find him and have to leave him in this shitty, unfinished, creepy-ass basement, and there were probably a million diseases down here just waiting to infest his rotting corpse. 

Or, maybe, he’d become like them, like all the people and things in this place—things that didn’t qualify as people, not anymore—and he’d come back. He’d be stuck here in this hotel basement, alone with only the man at the bar and whatever had hurt Richie upstairs and whatever it was that was down here with him to keep him company for forever. 

And Meat Man. 

Eddie was going to kill Bill if he made it out of this place alive.

“Richie!” Eddie called again, louder this time, and a pipe dripped and creaked, and his voice bordered on pleading and desperate. He held his breath and closed his eyes, and distantly, so quiet Eddie could have been imagining it, Richie answered. His voice bounced off the concrete brick walls from deeper in the basement, panicked and thick. _That’s it,_ he thought, _I really have gone crazy._ But he stepped toward Richie’s voice, anyway, fumbling along the wall as he went. 

Eddie’s foot met a thick, heavy rod of metal, and he heaved it off the ground with a grunt. His muscles burned under the weight of it. He gasped for breath, again, his chest burning around the edges of his lungs, but the farther he ventured into the darkness of the basement, the louder Richie’s cries became, each of them wordless and garbled or still too quiet for Eddie to make out. They were thick sobs, the worst sound Eddie thought he’d ever heard in his life—and he’d heard his own arm snap under Bowers’ boot, had heard Bill cry at Georgie’s funeral. 

Eddie had heard terrible, terrible things in his life, and somehow, Richie crying like this took the cake. 

The rod grew heavier and heavier in Eddie’s grasp, the weight digging into his shoulder at the base of his neck. His feet dragged under the weight of his own body. 

At first, Eddie couldn’t see the walls around him beyond the shadows, each side of the room out of reach no matter how much he craned to reach them. He stuck to one wall and didn’t dare glance over his shoulder—he’d read, once, that if he looked even once, he would go crazy with paranoia and keep looking again and again, and even if nothing was there, it would feel like someone was—but soon, the other wall and the ceiling grew closer and closer until he hunched over, and then, with no warning at all, the cramped room opened into a big, round-edged room that ran on in front of him for miles, probably. His footsteps echoed loudly down the tunnel. 

Somewhere in front of him, deep within the tunnel, so deep even the echo sounded like a whisper, Richie repeated a mantra of Eddie’s name. It echoed back at Eddie where he stood at the mouth, his shoes soaked the whole way through with water (hopefully just water, browned by the rust of pipes and nothing else, he couldn’t take it if he thought it could be anything but water and rust). His arm ached, his head pounded in time with his racing heart. 

Richie was crying, sobbing—weeping. His voice cracked. He groaned, something broken and nothing like anything Eddie had ever heard from Richie before, and his mind conjured an image of Richie bleeding out in this tunnel, and he knew he wouldn’t be able to carry him out of this place alone. 

Richie, he was supposed to laugh at his own dirty jokes, his head thrown back and cheeks stretched over a wide smile, all his crooked teeth on display. Even when Bowers had broken his nose the first time, Richie smiled around the blood and tears that poured down his face. He did the same the second time, and he even cracked a joke the third time it happened:

“Careful, Henry,” he’d said, hands cupping his nose and voice bordering on a groan, “you wouldn’t want people thinkin’ you’re making a habit out of breaking _my_ nose, would you?” 

It hadn’t been funny, but Richie made plenty of unfunny jokes that Eddie simply didn’t understand. 

But, now, Richie said nothing, and Eddie couldn’t imagine he’d be smiling when he found him. 

Eddie ran, then, faster than he ever had, and it didn’t help his breathing problem one bit. Little dark spots danced around the edges of his vision, lungs burning like someone had set a match under his sternum. Sweat gathered on his hairline as he ran, and the metal rod clanked on the brick of the walls in his clumsy movements. He stumbled and caught himself a second later, huffed and kept going because he had to get to Richie or he thought he might die—either he would die or Richie would or both of them, maybe, he didn’t know, and he didn’t spare any energy towards figuring it out. 

_We’ll die down here, I know we will!_

After what felt to Eddie’s poor lungs like an hour of running but was probably something closer to ten minutes (he ran a fast mile-and-a-quarter for a kid who grew up as a crippling asthmatic who hadn’t even been allowed to participate in P.E. most of the time, but he didn’t know he had run a mile-and-a-quarter for Richie and likely never would know), he came to a slumped-over form. Richie sat with his legs stretched out before him, blocking the rest of the tunnel beyond the point where that _thing_ had dumped him, and he cradled his arm close to his chest. His matted curls stuck to his forehead with water and dampness and dirt and maybe a little bit of his own blood as it ran in a steady, thick trickle over his eyebrow and into his eye. His lip was split, and tears ran down his dirtied cheeks. He didn’t have his glasses and squinted at Eddie’s face when he collapsed next to him. 

“Eds?” he asked, voice small and shaking. In lieu of answering, Eddie dropped the metal rod and wrapped his arms around Richie’s shoulders. He kneeled in the water, his pants long since ruined and soaked through ( _diseases, Eddie-bear, there are so many diseases in brown water, so never touch it. Never touch it, okay? Okay? There are diseases, and you know with your immune system, you’ll—_ ), and he held Richie tight to his chest. His heart echoed between them, and Eddie pressed his fingers to Richie’s neck to calm his own racing heart. He closed his eyes and sighed as he found the heartbeat under his fingers. Richie shuddered in his arms, and one arm came around and cupped the back of Eddie’s head. He buried his face in Eddie’s shoulder and breathed in and out in slow, controlled breaths. 

In through the nose, out through the mouth. Four-seven-eight. Eddie knew the counts, knew every breathing exercise in the book like the back of his own hand. 

“We’re leaving,” Eddie mumbled into the hair matted to Richie’s skull above his ear. He nodded, his hair tickling Eddie’s nose with the movement, and Eddie stood. Richie squinted up at him again, his mouth moving in silent words. His eyes widened almost comically, and his shaking hand rose to point at Eddie’s shoulder. A shiver ran up Eddie’s spine. He went stiff, and his lungs froze in his chest. He blinked like that would make it end, and he really just wanted this to be over, now, he _needed_ it to be over. 

He wanted to go home.

“He’s behind you,” Richie whispered, but he might as well have yelled it with how his voice carried in an echo down the tunnel. 

In one movement, Eddie stooped, wrapped his hand around the metal rod, and he screamed as he brought it up around himself in a smooth arch, the sound bubbling up from his chest and through his lips. Eddie screamed, the sound shrill and deafening, and Richie screamed too, his good arm curled over his head, and Eddie smashed the rod into the side of the _thing_ ’s upper half. He was aiming for the head but instead met its shoulder with a dull thump, and the force and the weight of the rod would have broken any person’s bone into pieces, but there was no crack, no sound, not even a groan, as the _thing_ collapsed in a heap before Eddie’s ruined sneakers. 

Eddie brought the rod down on its body again and again, still screaming bloody-murder (there was no blood as far as Eddie could tell, though his socks were soaked through with the brown water, the disease water, the rust water), until his arms and his chest couldn’t take it anymore and the thing at his feet no longer so much as twitched. His chest heaved. The rod slipped from his tight, white-knuckled grip and clattered against the ground. 

“I’m going to kill Bill,” he spat, a promise to Richie and to himself and to this _thing_ at his feet _,_ and despite the fact that his arm was bent entirely out of shape, his glasses were missing, and a lifetime of trauma laid out before them both, Richie laughed. Eddie glanced at him over his shoulder, and his lips quirked, but he couldn’t bring himself to smile, not yet. 

Richie laughed and laughed until he couldn’t breathe, and his sweaty, pale face turned bright red. His eyes sparkled, but that could have been tears left over from getting beaten to Hell and back; Eddie wasn’t quite sure. Richie sighed, then, and grinned. 

“That was hot,” he said, and Eddie rolled his eyes. He snorted, and he really could have cried, then. The urge to break down then and there simmered under his skin. He knew this Richie. He knew this Richie like he knew the back of his hand, maybe better. 

“Can we go now?” Eddie begged. “Please?” 

“Hold on, I have to throw up first. Might wanna turn away for this, Eddie Spaghetti.” Richie listed to the side and gagged hard. His muscles strained against his soaked shirt. He groaned and spit. He wiped his mouth on the back of his hand when he finished. 

“Don’t call me that,” Eddie chastised as he helped Richie off the ground. His joints popped and protested on the way off the ground.

The trek through the tunnel, back to the large room and the creaking stairs and the lobby, took longer than the way to the tunnel had. Richie stumbled every few steps, and Eddie caught him; Richie’s hand stayed tangled in Eddie’s shirt. The other, twisted and definitely broken, hung by his side, and Eddie’s own arm throbbed in sympathy. 

If Richie’s arm hadn’t been twisted like that, Eddie would have grabbed him by the hand, but he didn’t because he knew how bad broken arms hurt, and he marveled at how Richie hadn’t passed out from the pain yet.

The man from the bar, his glass, and his cake-batter blood were all gone when the basement door opened before them, and—battered and beaten—Richie and Eddie stumbled into the lobby again, the light overhead burning their eyes, so different from the dark below. Shapes swirled Eddie’s eyes again, and he stumbled. He listed to the side, but Richie caught him by the hand tangled in his shirt. 

Perhaps the man at the bar disappeared with the shadow man-thing from the basement, or maybe he disappeared the moment no one was around to see him—Eddie hardly cared to mull it over as they collapsed through the front door and onto the street. He supposed, silently, that it didn’t matter anymore.   
They were safe. They had made it, and they’d made it out alive, even if it meant Richie would spend the night in the emergency room _again._

Bill so _totally_ owed them.

The two laid there on the sidewalk for a long moment, chests heaving and fingers tangled together between them, until Eddie sat himself up so fast his head spun—a head injury, probably, but he didn’t care so much about that, now—and leaned himself over Richie’s upper half. He kissed him square on the mouth, hard enough to hurt if every other part of their bodies didn’t hurt already, and Richie kissed back just as desperately. His hand, the one belonging to his unbroken arm, tugged on the collar of Eddie’s stained, sweat-soaked t-shirt, trying to keep him there or pull him closer, Eddie didn’t know. 

Richie tasted like vomit. Eddie pulled away and made a face, expression pinched and displeased but happy under the layer of grime and disgust. 

“You will never tell _anyone_ our first kiss was right after you threw up, okay?” Richie shrugged, winced, and nodded. 

“I left my toothbrush in there.” He glanced up at the side of the building. The bright “HOTEL” light flashed back at them. Eddie fell back to lay next to Richie. If he tried hard enough, he might have been able to point out room 220, but he didn’t feel like trying, so he didn’t. 

“Yeah, well, Bill can buy you a new one.” 

“I lost my glasses.” 

“He’s literally a best-selling author, Rich.” 

A moment of silence passed between them. Distantly, sirens grew closer. 

“You believe in ghosts yet?” Richie asked sincerely. His eyes searched Eddie’s face where it hovered not a foot above his own. Even without looking, Eddie could see his wide grin and sparkling eyes and the blood caked above his brow. 

“Shut the hell up, you dickwad.” 

* * * *

Richie’s cast was bright pink at his own request, and he forced all the other Losers to sign it, even asked the doctor for a Sharpie. He made Bill wait until last so his was the smallest, and Eddie went first. He dotted his “i” with a heart and kissed Richie as he capped the marker and passed it along to Bev. She cooed. 

Richie babbled on about everything—his bravery, _Eddie’s_ bravery, how hot Eddie was (Eddie interrupted, then, but Richie ignored him and kept going, talking loudly over him), and how they danced in the cocktail room. The doctors had him pretty doped up; otherwise, he probably wouldn’t have said so much, or, maybe, he still would have. Eddie blushed bright red as Mike congratulated them with a wide, toothy smile and eyes that said _finally_. Their hands—the ones not made unbearably large by a cast—were tangled together at Richie’s side. 

“So, _William_ ,” Eddie asked, and could you blame him for the bitterness in his voice? He had almost just died for him, no matter how much Bill tried to deny the severity of what had just happened to them. “How is this new book going?” 

Bill grinned sheepishly and ran a hand over the back of his neck. 

“Well, um, a-about that—” 

(Stan and Mike had to convince the doctors not to call the police after Eddie’s shrill shouts of “Let me at him! I’ll kill him, I swear I will! I’ll kill you, Bill Denbrough!”)

_bonus_

——

“I understand you’re close friends with Bill Denbrough,” the host said, and Richie adjusted himself on the uncomfortable chair. 

“I hate the guy, actually,” he told the audience, and laughter filled the studio. Richie grinned. All throughout his childhood, he dreamed of a life in the spotlight, his name on the headlines, his face on the front page, a million people watching. For now, a thousand literature nerds and a cramped studio with uncomfortable chairs would do for him. 

“You _hate_ him?” 

“I’ve known him since we were kids, and he’s one of my best friends, but I do! I hate him.” Richie laughed, knowing Bill was watching from his own living room in Los Angeles. “You see this?” Richie held up the bright pink cast covered with cute, little doodles—courtesy of Eddie—and the names of all the Losers. 

“Yeah, it’s sort of hard to miss,” the host replied, his straight, white teeth sparkling under the light. Richie pushed his glasses up on his nose and leaned forward. 

“I was doing him a favor when I got it,” Richie said, head ducked like he was telling the host some big secret, “so you might say he owes me, right?” 

“I would say so!” Richie nodded and leaned back in his seat, careful not to slouch. Eddie gave him rules to follow— _no swearing, no slouching, and no sex jokes_ —and sent him on his way. Richie didn’t want to disappoint him, so he sat up straight and didn’t swear and didn’t make any stupid jokes for the rest of the interview. 

When it was over, he half jogged across the parking lot and ducked into the passenger’s seat of Eddie’s car. Eddie turned down the radio, some catchy, top 40’s song he’d been humming for the past few days, and smiled sweetly. 

“How’d I do?” Richie asked, and Eddie tapped his chin in faux-thought. 

“You did great,” he said after a moment. He paused, eyes half-lidded and a smile lingering on his lips. He started as if remembering something, suddenly, and he pulled a crumpled piece of paper out of his back pocket. “Bill called the apartment while you were on, told me to give you a message.” 

Richie took the piece of paper between two fingers and unfolded it. 

_Go to Hell_ , it read in Eddie’s pretty, curly handwriting. _Love, Bill_

——

Eddie’s hands shook, and his insides filled with a cottony, buzzing anxiety. He stared at himself in the small mirror on his desk. He ran a finger over his brow and chewed his bottom lip until he feared it would split. 

“C’mon, Eddie,” Bev said, voice grainy through the speakers of his desktop computer. Her face filled one of the windows he had pulled up, and he spared her a single glance before he returned his attention back to his reflection. “You look fine—besides, it’s _Richie._ ” 

He knew that, of course, and he’d never been nervous around Richie before, so why should he now? Never mind the fact that he was about ten minutes from his first date with the boy he’d been hopelessly, head-over-heels in love with since the fourth grade, since before he even knew what love was. 

“I know it’s Richie,” he told her, “but it’s _Richie._ ” He shrugged and tugged at the hem of his sweater, one of his favorites. He liked the way it complimented his eyes and his hair, and he knew Richie liked it, too, just from the fact he said as much every time Eddie wore it. 

He thought it was only fitting to wear it tonight. 

“Just stop over-analyzing—” Eddie’s door rattled with a knock, and he jumped, eyes wild, and swallowed hard. Bev sighed and collapsed back on her bed dramatically; if there was anyone on Earth more dramatic than Richie, it was Beverly. 

“That’s him, gotta go—love you, bye!” he said in a single, rushed breath. He closed out of the window with her face before Bev could say anything more. He stood up straight and closed his eyes and exhaled hard through his nose. “It’s just Richie,” he told himself before he moved for the door. 

Richie stood in the hallway with both hands buried in the pockets of his jeans. His eyes were trained on the ceiling, and he leaned back on his heels. He looked more nervous than Eddie had ever seen him look. 

“Hey, Rich,” he said, and Richie jumped like he hadn’t noticed the door opening. Maybe he hadn’t. A smile broke out across his face, one that showed all of his crooked teeth. 

“Eds! Don’t you look just dashing.” Richie bowed and held out his hand like an old-timey gentleman, and Eddie laid his hand in Richie’s palm, chuckling. 

“Right back at you.” And he did; Richie always looked nice, despite his horrid fashion taste and the Losers’ ribbing. It must have been his confidence, Eddie figured. Now, he wore a loose button up with a small print on it, the first few buttons undone, and straight-legged pants and the converse he wore everywhere, evident by the way the soles were falling out. They were covered in small doodles like his cast had been before he got it off a week prior to their date. 

Richie led Eddie to his truck, opened the passenger’s side door for him, and rounded the front in a half jog. 

“Where are you taking me?” Eddie asked as Richie pulled out of the parking lot, and Richie laughed, fiddling with the volume knob on his radio until the music was a low, dull buzz beneath their voices. 

“Well, if I’m gonna murder you, I need solitude, right?” 

“ _Please,_ like you could over power me.” Eddie rolled his eyes, and this felt normal, like them. They were talking like this, and the tight, semi-panicked feeling in Eddie’s chest dissolved. Richie seemed relaxed, too, as he drove with one hand and reached out to capture Eddie’s fingers with the other one. 

“Fine,” Richie said, sighing like Eddie was twisting his arm, “I asked Stan where to take you for our, uh, date, and he said to take you bird-watching, but, you know, that’s about as boring as actual Hell—don’t tell Stan I said that, he’d beat my ass. Plus, you and I agreed on eight p.m., and what birds are out at eight? Owls and bats, and I’m not about to sit around in silence with you and watch for owls and bats, so—so we’re going stargazing. Is that okay? It’s kinda really damn nerdy, but—” 

“It’s perfect, Rich,” Eddie interrupted. He squeezed Richie’s hand and brushed the pad of his thumb over his knuckles. Richie’s face flushed bright red. 

Richie drove for a long time, until they came to an old, empty field. Tall grasses blew in the breeze, and Eddie looked up the moment he stepped down from the truck. He’d never seen the stars so clearly, not even from the Quarry when he and the others used to sneak out and swim at night. 

“Woah—Richie,” Eddie murmured, and Richie nodded rapidly. He took Eddie by the hand again and led him farther into the field, away from the truck and the road. “How did you find this place?” 

“A little birdie told me.”

“It was Bev, wasn’t it?” 

“It was Bev,” Richie confirmed, and he laughed. Eddie couldn’t help but stare at him. 

Richie took him to the middle of the field, and the wind blew all around. The grass danced, and Eddie couldn’t take his eyes away from the stars above him. He could feel Richie’s eyes on him, burning straight through him to the core of his being. 

Finally, Eddie dragged his eyes toward the ground, toward Richie, and they stood there for a moment until Richie’s hands came up and cupped both of Eddie’s cheeks. He moved forward, slowly, like he feared Eddie would move away when they both knew he wouldn’t. Richie handled him like he was made of glass or—or stars. 

Richie pressed his lips to Eddie’s, and Eddie’s knees turned to watery Jell-O. He held onto the fabric of Richie’s shirt to keep himself upright. When they pulled away, both breathless, Richie leaned his forehead against Eddie’s, his glasses slipping down his nose. He didn’t bother to fix them. 

“If anyone asks,” Eddie murmured, “that was our first kiss.” 

——

Eddie woke up in a cold sweat, dark images of a figure and cake batter blood flashing before his eyes. His hand shot out and met something solid and warm, and Richie shifted in the bed next to him. 

“Eds?” he murmured, voice groggy and heavy with sleep. He squinted out of a habit, dark eyes straining to make anything out in the dark. His hand found Eddie’s, and he said nothing when Eddie gripped his fingers hard enough to hurt. “Nightmare?” Eddie nodded and closed his eyes tight. Richie shifted again and sat up. The sheets fell away and pooled around his hips. 

Eddie struggled to pull in a breath around the panic in his lungs. It felt too much like how he felt in the basement, yearning for his inhaler. 

_I don’t need it, it was fake, a lie, I don’t need it._

His throat burned, and a sob tore through his body. 

“I’m okay, Eddie, and you’re okay. It’s okay.” Richie kept up the mantra in low murmurs. Eddie’s fingers tangled with the curls at the nape of Richie’s neck, and he leaned his head on his chest until he felt his pulse under his ear. 

His breathing calmed, though it took many, many minutes. 

“I’m okay. You’re okay,” Richie said again. Eddie sniffled. The two fell asleep in each other’s arms. 

——

“Richie,” Bill started, and Richie closed his eyes and sighed. 

“I know that tone.” 

“Don’t be mad—” 

“Just tell me where you’re sending me off to.” 

——

Richie ended up in the hospital again. He hated Bill, and he had half a mind to sic Eddie on him as he sat in the chair on the other side of the room. Eddie would do it, too, if his glare was anything to go by. If looks could kill, Bill would be six feet under by now. Richie vowed to never help him with _research_ again. Seriously, his bank account couldn’t handle all the damn hospital bills, and hell if he would ever find a decent insurance rate again. 

No, he wouldn’t help Bill ever again—that was what the internet was for. 

(That was a lie. He’d answer the phone when Bill called, go where Bill needed him to go, and Bill would never pay him back, the son of a bitch.)


End file.
